The CEO making an art of outstanding service

0:11Hello and welcome to the Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. This week on the show, we are on the move. We're meeting the leader of a business for whom handling with care is literally their raison d 'etre, fine art movers and specialist super premium services company Cadogan Tate. Our client base is as likely to have a residence in London as Gloucestershire, Aspen, Maine and then a super yacht. And they want the same level of care, attention and trust in a provider to service that entire lifestyle. And my vision is to move it away from being defined as a moving or logistics business and actually into a sort of luxury residential services platform.

0:58This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:11You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Ben Clark is the CEO of Cadogan Tate, one of the world's leading specialists in the movement and care of fine art, servicing of exceptional interiors and stewardship of high-value private collections. Having spent more than two decades at Christie's before leading Cadogan Tate's international growth, Ben sits at a fascinating intersection where art, design and luxury meet, as well as some great tales to tell. This gives Ben a unique perspective on how the world's wealthiest individuals, collectors and institutions live, collect, build across borders and think about legacy.

1:52It's a pleasure to welcome Ben Clark to The Entrepreneurs. Ben began by talking to me about his path into the business and the compelling origin story of Cadogan Tate itself. Well, Cadogan Tate's foundations were almost 50 years old. Our DNA, if you like, really was in that art market. So Christie's was our first client back in 1977. And the founder of Cadogan Tate then, there's a great tale where he just got his truck, parked it outside King Street at Christie's, and just persuaded clients to start using him. He soon became the go-to logistics partner for Christie's for 20 years. And when Christie's moved to New York, Cadogan Tate opened to New York.

2:34And again, when Christie's moved to Los Angeles, Cartagena Tate followed. And I was at Christie's for a long time. And indeed, when I started at Christie's in the 2000s, Cartagena Tate trucks, Cartagena Tate art handlers were everywhere. They were sort of part of the furniture, if you like. So when I was asked to be CEO several years ago, or a year and a half ago, it was just like coming home, actually. It was a sort of natural eco, being part of the ecosystem and felt very comfortable and natural, same client base, etc. But as to what we do now, we sort of moved away from being exclusively fine art, And in the last 15 years, we had much more into the sort of luxury homes, interior designers.

3:11So interior designers, AD100 interior designers are as relevant and important to our day-to-day business as museums, auction houses and commercial galleries. And do you think that change or that pivot has been, was it sort of largely organic and it was informed by the conversations you had with clients or that Cadogan Take was having with clients where they required that degree of super personalized service, very trusted service, a degree of discretion. And actually it was a natural expansion to kind of look into those areas. Or was it a bit more of a sort of a strategic play, a bit of both maybe?

3:46I think possibly a bit of both, but definitely organic. you know in its first 30 years because I can take was a founder run business he was a classic founder entrepreneur and for those first 30 40 years everything was organic development I doubt a McKinsey or one of those consultancies were involved at all in those first 30 don't listen to what those people say but nonetheless I think he did listen to his clients and he did listen to the demands and needs of the clients since the tastes of the sort of global ultra high net worths developed. So they were buying fine art at Christie's, Sotheby's, art galleries, but then they'd start buying design, and then they got interior designers involved.

4:25And what Codugan Tate offers, and effectively how we differentiate ourselves, is that technical expertise. What in the industry is called white glove service, which when I transferred over from auction was a little bit of a confusion, because in auction, white glove is a sale that is 100 % sold. But actually, in the logistics business, white glove just means luxury handling with really expert global expertise and museum quality service and i guess also interestingly as the lives that the clients of cadogan take lead change they probably they were always international and we had these hubs particularly for the art market but the way people live the way they run their own businesses their lives their households their families it's all much more international it's much more or it needs to be as seamless as frictionless as possible and presumably that is a bit of it's another it's not really a usp but it's another usp if that's not tautological cadogan take is great and has built its reputation on facilitating that kind of frictionless movement of things things of value yeah that's exactly right and my vision is to move it away from being defined as a moving or logistics business and actually into a sort of luxury residential services platform and capitalize on that global network that we've been building to do exactly that our client base is as likely to have a residence in London as Gloucestershire, Aspen, Maine, and then a superyacht.

5:51And they want the same level of care, attention, and trust in a provider to service that entire lifestyle. So it really is catering towards the luxury lifestyle development. As we look to acquire businesses, we very much target regions where we feel the global luxury client base tend to, well you described them as hubs earlier have those hubs current hubs are exciting it's interesting whenever anybody's operating sort of in and around that hnw uhnw space i'm always interested to find out what where are you feeling confident where are you feeling bullish where is there a degree of caution whether that's on geographic terms obviously this sort of unprecedented intergenerational wealth transfer is super interesting and the kinds of decisions strategically that collectors make are going to be very different if you're a millennial or a gen z-er than maybe if you're a boomer etc but as you look at all of those different factors ben what things i don't know fill you with confidence are there areas where you're a bit more circumspect tell me about how you make sense of the world yeah well to start on the point you just made about intergenerational wealth actually for us that doesn't really affect our business in fact it's an amplification because it means we have more clients with more luxury assets in more residences.

7:08And so a business like Codug and Tate isn't affected by the perhaps volatility in the fine art market because whether a client is inheriting a stored collection or collection from a family, whether they're acquiring it from their own and building their own collection, we are there to look after all parties. So really intergenerational wealth for us is an amplification, which is obviously positive. More clients. More clients, more assets, more things for us to store, look after, install, hang, whichever service they require, and move around the world for them. In terms of locations and geographies, we've just acquired a business in Phoenix, which I'm very excited about.

7:45It closed a few months ago. And again, around Phoenix, you have Scottsdale. And there's a huge second home ownership in Phoenix, especially from the Midwest, from Chicago, Wisconsin. It's similarly from New York to Florida, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach. That business I'm very excited about. Continually we'll focus on Florida in terms of, well, it's not even wealth migration, but it's definitely, we've seen that. There's a lot I've read about it. California is an endless source. In Europe, the UK remains an important hub for us. It's our global HQ. It remains important. We saw a lot of wealth transfer, and indeed we were the people doing those physical transfers last year.

8:25So we can use that data to really see where wealth is moving. But again, our French business is doing fantastically well, both in the South of France and Paris. So it's the hubs that you would expect. Where we are not, the opportunity lies in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia. And I spent time living in South and working in Southeast Asia. So it's a huge opportunity over there. We already do a lot of projects there. But again, they're driven from our European hubs. And that's where we cater to those clients from. Tell me about, because we've mentioned trust and discretion, these sort of values, a couple of times already, Ben.

8:57You come in to steward a business, as you said, with these strong foundations over 50-odd plus years. But as the leader, it's been a relatively short period of time, lots of goodwill. And obviously, you know people from Christie's and from your other networks anyway. But how do you ensure that you're not just maintaining but building on that trust? And I guess particularly when you're acquiring clients or businesses in newer markets or an increasingly diverse range of markets by geography, how do you tell that trust story? is I guess a lot of it is IRL meetings, FaceTime, getting to just meet people and chat to them, but convening over a pleasant meal.

9:35But how do you ensure you're servicing that part of the operation? I think if I look back at my career, one of my greatest learnings at Christie is looking after clients in the West and also in Asia. It's true across all cultures, is that trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. That is one of those things I tell my children almost every day, whether it's in the personal life, friendship groups, but certainly professionally and with clients. And so using that basis, you take things slowly, first and foremost, but also a huge focus on the company culture. Because as you say, it already has a lot of goodwill, but it's actually how do you maintain that?

10:14And especially as you scale the business, how do you maintain that exceptional client service, that exceptional client trust? And as when we acquire, I mean, And I think for myself, I was trying to define, as you say, I'm not a classic founder entrepreneur. I suppose I could call myself an operator entrepreneur. And what I mean by that is when we acquire businesses as I'm stewarding Cadogan Tate, how do you scale up? How do we grow in a way that maintains the trust and the culture? And so we spend a lot of time talking to the founders of businesses that we're acquiring about their culture, about them, about the expectations, about how have they instilled culture in their workforce?

10:52What's really important for us is that we have a global workforce and everyone's full time. We don't employ outsiders. So everyone goes through the same standard of training, learning, whether that be, you know, our crews and our technicians are the front line. They're the people with our clients in their personal, in their houses at those stressful times of moving. And we make sure that the training of those individuals is extensive and also global. But as we acquire businesses, we also learn from them. We're also listening to them. And what do they do well that maybe we're not doing? How can we improve?

11:24And one of the beliefs I have as a leader is this kind of concept of continuous improvement. I know that sounds very jargony, but I love the Formula One analogy that a Formula One race car, I think, has got about 16 ,000 parts thereabouts. And I think by the end of a season, 90 % of those parts have been changed, but not just changed, but improved. And so the Monday after every race, there's a powwow between the technician, the driver, every single member of the team to say, what can we improve? What can we do better? What went right? What went wrong? And I think bringing that mentality where the Formula One car is effectively a prototype every time it goes on a racetrack, what I've been trying to instill in my tenure so far is just that constant sense of improvement and change when necessary.

12:10And change can mean stop doing things and start doing other things. So it's not all about scaling. It's not taking what we have. It's about taking what we have and constantly improving it and learning from outside, from within, from ideas, from the teams, wherever they are in the world. Lots of things you talk about. It's funny, we go back to that building of Kodok and Tate through the 70s, 80s, but even this idea, this sort of continual fascination with iterative improvement is slower. Do you think that, I don't know, you could, if you were, say, starting your career in business today, would you get the amount of time, Ben, that you have had?

12:48I mean, obviously, I guess with your sort of leadership team, there must be a shared appetite to drive according to these same foundational values. But I always get the sense that there's an impatience, actually, to drive change quicker. Do you think it's, I don't know, the way you operate, does that make you a bit of an outlier? Or actually, do you think there are lots of businesses that are still run according to those values? I think so. So I spent, in between Christie's and Cadogan Tate, I spent a year and a half in a true entrepreneurial startup, fintech startup. And I learned there what I was not good at, which was being a founder entrepreneur.

13:20The whole culture of the fintech world didn't suit me in as much as there's that sort of, I'm not going to say fake it till you make it, but there's that. I think there's a bit of that. There's a constant iterative, like, let's try this, let's try this, let's promise that, try that. That just didn't suit me. And I suddenly realized personally my skills were suited to growing and building scaffolding around existing products and growing them in a scalable way. In terms of pace and the pace that the startup was things were changing on an hourly basis. And so you never knew on a Monday morning what you'd be dealing with that week.

13:53I think having a bit more structure helps. But I also think the importance of, I think it was Peter Drucker who created this concept of a not-to-do list. and that's something that I have it actually written on my whiteboard in the office and whenever we have an executive team meeting I start it's I don't ask people to start with what are your priorities for the week house what are your priorities not to do this week that is something that um you know again we had a sort of global off site in February for all our senior leaders and that was what I finished the two days on was this conversation around everyone has a to-do list but go back to your desk on Monday morning and say what is your not to do list do you think that because i know you're quite sort of active in terms of your pronouncements you sort of write and talk a lot about leadership on some of these platforms does the monocle doesn't really do the socials as you may or may not be aware ben and i think it's because there's so much white noise and we're interested in proper editing good curation to use another slight cliche what role does that kind of storytelling then play for cadogan tech Because obviously that's a big factor in some of these, in the fintech space.

15:01How are you getting these narratives out on these platforms? Do you consider it white noise? Is it too loud? Is that one of the reasons it didn't agree with you, do you think, perhaps? I think in fintech, it was simply, I was the only, that's pure salesperson, client-facing person in there. Everyone else came from a technology background. And we just, our careers had grown separately. We just had different backgrounds, almost spoke a different language, quite frankly. That's not to say I like to think of myself as at least I'm not tech savvy, but I like to adopt technology, almost to my detriment in that I need to say no more often.

15:36So when a colleague says, let's use this, I need to say no a lot. I'm inclined to go, yes, let's give it a go. I don't think technology is white noise. I think it's when used correctly, it's definite amplification in our space. In terms of social, it's important for new clients. it has to be. When I arrived at Cadogan, we had very little social presence, virtually no proactive marketing. And essentially, I inherited a business that was operationally excellent on a global basis. It didn't spend enough time after my sort of 60 days of really listening and learning. I realized that they hadn't done a client survey in 10 years.

16:12The known clients were very important to the company but actually we needed to look at or make all our decisions through the client lens and ask ourselves what would truly benefit a client rather than what we think would benefit a client so within our first my first three months we had done secret shopping exercises a lot of client reviews and learned a lot about what we were doing really well and learned about where we could improve i was gonna say what what things did you learn that you maybe i don't know maybe changed already were there some real kind of the the scales fell from your eyes a little bit?

16:44The interesting point was, especially if we compare ourselves to our competitors, is that none of us were knocking it out of the park. We were doing really well, let's say, at the beginning and the end, or in the middle and the end, and maybe our competitors were doing it better at the beginning in terms of, say, communication or over-communication with clients. So again, just small tweaks on how do we communicate better with our clients in a more systematic way. Again, and that's where we can use technology to help our client-facing teams, But again, not to put out chatbots, but to allow the teams internally to get up to speed quicker on what they should be discussing with clients.

17:22Let's take a little bit of a step back, Ben. I like you also train a lens across, because of the experience you've shared with us already, your long career. Just sort of the shifting sands, if you like, of global luxury premium products, the way people engage with these parts of their lives. What's most exciting, it's funny, we're in an ever more digital first world, and yet the bulk, I presume, of the work that you do is still driven by in real life. As you said, it's the collection of great art. It's the design and care of premium properties. Are you seeing changes in the way that this demography thinks about what luxury means, even, actually?

18:09my inference would be and I've never actually asked clients that but my inference would be that among that demographic as you called it actually in the same way that in an AI first world communication skills are becoming ever more important to differentiate individuals and actually hard assets like find out you know historically we know people go to gold but actually find it's not for pure investment sake it's also for an emotional investment You know, real assets, whether it be a Picasso or a Monet or a Warhol or an antique table or a Mark Newsome desk or simply just a wonderfully decorated room.

18:49How people want to experience real life is, and you see it, I think, in the travel industry, it's much easier now to sell experiences, one-off experiences than just let's go to Sicily for the weekend. I think that people want to live in the real world and have an experience and therefore the situation in which they find themselves, their house, the hotel they stay in, what that looks like, how that feels becomes ever more important. And that's what I think we mean by irreplaceable assets or irreplaceable belongings and possessions. Again, I'm often asked what's the most difficult thing to move or pack or ship.

19:26You've not been looking at my next page of questions, have you? people expect me to say Monet, Picasso, etc. Yes, that's incredibly difficult, but we put the care and attention into that as we do to what we might deem to be the mundane thing. When we move a house, often people have big collections of Lego, and whether it's your Starship Enterprise or your kid's castle that they've built, they care as much about how you're going to pack and maintain that Lego model as they do their prize print. And so we put as much care and attention into packing the Lego as we would a Monet, obviously to a different degree but the conversation remains the same because it's about emotional investment for the client it's not purely a financial investment and that must be tough like you mentioned your excellent frontline staff earlier there's a lot of trust i guess you put in them to read that room to engage emotionally and it's quite hard to sort of train somebody i think you can obviously sort of inculcate people with the values over time if you've got a new hire who's popped straight into that as you said it's a very stressful time often for people what do you look for are there obvious kind of traits qualities that those frontline staff tend to exhibit i guess a curiosity a friendliness a willingness to engage what kinds of skills make that person good at the very difficult it's difficult to identify at the moment of hiring so i would for those frontline staff for every 10 hires we probably have to interview well there's i think our latest stats are out of 10 interviews we probably hire one out of 10 hires, we let go of 50 % after a month, just simply because it wasn't what they expected or they realized actually we're too demanding in our values, etc.

21:07But that's the ratio we work to. It's very difficult to upfront, but once they're in, we give them massive training. I mean, in our warehouses in London and New York, we actually have prefabricatedly built apartments where it's a bit like an army sort of building something. where we get people to move furniture, hang pictures, teach them how to get it through doors. I mean, it sounds weird, but you go through that training before you're allowed anywhere near the field. It's not a question of get in a truck, join a crew, see how you do. We give them that training first and foremost, how to pack, how to crate.

21:41And indeed, we have other firms come and use our training center for it because it's so well known for that. So the Cadogan Tate Academy is really something that I personally invested to try and build out and scale globally. we're considering converting one of our older trucks into this sort of in america a sort of a small little studio apartment and taking it to site to site to help train people so we're looking at all these initiatives um and we take it very seriously so and in fact i was listening to one of your podcasts earlier on is it busy oh yeah and i suddenly thought and i was um i mean i had never heard of it before i thought immediately send it to my children saying come on get on this platform i thought it's brilliant and actually i love the concept that actually we could possibly differentiate the soft skills by using a recruitment tool like that rather than your classic cv well that's that's really interesting and it's funny because we're talking about increasing digitalization the rise of ai as a screening tool businesses kind of have to look at these things and yet as you said to assess those soft skills it's like i was talking to ewan from um for uh how's run worth ewan and he and he invented and he was saying to me I would never ever work with anyone unless we've dined together first like properly at least once I was like I would love that that's a good that's a good lesson but you can't know somebody's proficiency with those soft skills so how yeah I don't know what have you got up your sleeve well we've just assessed them and if that I'm brusely it sounds a little bit it's kind of sink or swim it has to be but in the training process not in the field yeah so you know we can do that But it's, again, to do that at scale requires a program, requires a team to run that.

23:16And so, again, we have to invest in that. We call it the Cadogan State Academy rather grandly, but it does what it says on the tin. I like it. Yeah, just quickly, quick fire round. Most challenging, I don't know, objet or thing to move. There must be a couple of, I don't know if it's funny. It's probably not funny when you could actually do it. There are a couple of examples. We once moved an Amish shed from Utah to Colorado, which was quite challenging, as part of a collection. Take it all apart, reassemble, or lift it? We had to hire a team. We did actually have to hire experts for that. So we hired 40 Amish craftsmen.

23:53We shipped it, and then we took them and built it again. That was an unusual one. The tip of a spaceship, so once at Art Basel, Miami, Our team there was sent just a photograph on an iPhone saying, can you move this? And they assumed it was a photograph. I went, sure, not a problem. And they went to collect it. And it was actually the tip of the space shuttle that had landed in the sea. It was a pod, I suppose you call it. And so then we had to get this pod. And it had been decorated by an artist. And so it was a sort of, by then, an artwork sold by an art gallery. And the acquirer wanted us to store it and ship it.

24:27So we had to get that into our Miami warehouse. and that was a pretty unusual thing to have to move good grief plenty of things i would you say no because it was funny you know we're talking about acquiring other businesses i and i wondered it's more interesting when you decide actually this isn't this isn't right or is there a i don't know a client or a brief where you're like we're going to say no i mean does that happen i guess it must how do you know when ben enough's enough or you need to look when we walk away from a an acquisition well an acquisition or even if it's a particularly challenging project is what is it different maybe it's different criteria for those decisions they are different criteria but it's a really important point it goes back to my sort of not to-do list and actually last year we installed a protocol for our frontline crews because we have these roles called chief arc technicians we have one in europe and two in america who are the sort of uber uber specialists in how to handle specialist goods whether it's packing hanging, creating, they've usually worked either at auction houses or commercial art galleries, or in some instances, for blue chip artists in their studios.

25:33So they really know the ins and the outs. It's about minimizing risk. And so we went from a default philosophy of the client is always right to a balanced philosophy of the client is always right, but you have the right to say no. We actually had to instill a sort of operating procedure. I can't remember what we called it the say no procedure, which is when we gave the crew the authority to say, can we pause? And I just need to phone a superior and double check this. Even if the demanding client says, I want it hung on that wall. If you're not comfortable, you can say pause. So, but we actually had to instill that as a standard operating procedure.

26:10I like that they're still right, but you can say no. It's an elegant sort of pirouette out of that pressure point. Ben, just finally, what are you most excited about? I don't know if you can give us some exclusive reveals on the program but just tell me some things that you're excited about as you look forward global expansion i mean there's still we're not in the middle east we're not in southeast asia constantly talking lots of conversations on the go there and how we can create that luxury residential platform a services platform for the luxury world there's a lot of potential a lot of growth we haven't even started to scratch the surface that was ben clark the ceo of cadogan Tate.

26:48And you can find out more by heading to cadugantate.com.

27:03And that's all for this episode of The Entrepreneurs. We'll be back at the same time next week with more movers and shakers sharing their stories. The programme is edited by Jack Dewars. You can listen again and find out more about it at monocle.com. That's where you can subscribe to Monocle magazine and ensure you're reading more about better businesses every month. If you'd like to get in touch with the Entrepreneurs team, email me, Tom Edwards, on te at monocle.com. For now, goodbye and thanks for listening to The Entrepreneurs.

27:44Thank you.